Z Angles Gallery is a mobile gallery with projects and collaborations organized with/in other art institutions. 2016 will be a year of warming up, travelling, creating new contacts with artists and professionals. Not being limited to a given space but searching proper places to think exhibitions as site specific installations for the artist’s work this nomadism will also challenge the ways we communicate in a permanently changing social landscape.

Text on the window, view from the street: ‘I would also long for open and clear things, for fresh air and for the sincere surprise triggered by simple sentences.’

Erika Baglyas
uses elements of her biography as raw material for her art. Places and objects
are surprisingly able to express the specific time of her life and, denying its
linear nature, to capture the past in the present.Born in Dunaföldvár, as a child, Erika Baglyas
visited Dunaújváros so often that the town became a permanent childhood
location for her.Personal history
became irrevocably entangled with historical connotations of the place
(„Stalintown”, Kádár-era, etc.) and a conviction of the artist seems to be that
political and social systems can mould or transform destinies to an extent
where they reach into the present beyond the span of several generations.

The Institution of
Contemporary Art (Kortárs Művészeti Intézet), the two-floors exhibition space
in Dunaújváros, with its shop-window-like room looking upon the residential
block around, the obscure and isolated room and the dark cellar gallery with
the flight of stair leading down there all offer an opportunity for exhibited
works of art to reveal their content on a palette ranging from the extremely
personal to the most estranged identity and to levels totally bereft of
meaning.

The artist tries
to establish a connection with pedestrians through her determined and yet
hopeful statement displayed in the huge window (‘I would also long for open
and clear things, for fresh air and for the sincere surprise triggered by
simple sentences.’)while she also sets the direction for her own life and
art, declaring an interest in things that are open,clean, fresh,
simple, sincere. Erika Baglyas relies upon the strength of
everyday expressions, thus she places her drawings, a series of drawings in
defense of feminine honor, bearing the title “Maculate” („Makula”), literally
in the front window. The room behind the front space is a much more intimate
one. Here the artist exhibits the moulds fashioned using left-over copper tubes
inherited from her father. The moulds preserve negatives of iconic objects
owned by the late father (scissors, knife, screwdriver). The question is what
are these moulds intended for and what kind of objects would they yield?
Because a pair of scissors created this way would obviously have no cutting
edge!

The indigo book
is another means to suspend meaning and original functionality: an isolated
universe comes to life between its pages, where originals cannot be
distinguished from copies, where precedent and consequence melt while the book
itself becomes un-writable and illegible. The indigo drawings are seemingly the
most pretentious pieces of the entire exhibition, yet the drawing (the line) is
a mere copy (indigo traces), designating the lack of the original. The artistic
reality of Erika Baglyas is built upon the lack condensed into presence.

The floor of the
lower space is covered with thousands of indigo sheets waiting for visitors’
feet to leave traces upon them. This could pass for a collective work of art
but can also act as a starting point or raw material for further works.

Z Angles
Gallery was
created this year in Cluj, nevertheless this very exhibition passes for its
opening event.The establishment sets
out as a nomad gallery, wishing to focus energies upon openness and traveling,
upon cooperation with artists, professionals and institutions of art, upon
establishing connections with novel sections of the public.Traveling is also settling and discovery – we
might call it, borrowing a term from a series of drawings by Erika Baglyas, a
‘quest for the home’.All our stops in
space and time will become our homes, and we will be responsible to keep these
homes open and alive.